Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Our next big room update on the to-do list is our guest bedroom. Our poor guests currently have to sleep on an air mattress while staring at vanilla (like spoiled vanilla, not yummy vanilla) colored walls, with no color or interesting things to look at. I knowww, we are terrible hosts.

Source: http://www.quickmeme.com/Charles-Barkley

The biggest reason we haven't messed with this room yet is because of expenses. Cash money. We're trying to slowly fill our house without breaking the bank. Our short-term goal is to buy a new king sized mattress for the master, and then move our queen bed into the guest bedroom, so the furniture situation in the guest room is on hold until we can replace our master bedroom furniture. Smell what I'm stepping in? Anyway, I'm already very eager to re-do our guest bedroom and I feel like I owe it to our past and future guests to make this happen soon.

Here's a picture of our current guest bedroom situation. This picture was taken when we first bought the house and we have literally changed nothing since we moved in.

While searching the world wide web for some inspiration, I came across olioboard.com. Have y'all heard of it? I'm not joking when I tell you that it's life changing. I really do not know how I'm going to be a productive human to society now that this gem is in my life. If you're like I was and don't know what the heck Olioboard is, it's an inspiration board where you can create 2D and 3D mood boards. I've seen these things all over pinterest and popular DIY blogs, but always assumed they made them in Photoshop or some other fancy/expensive editing tool. Nope. They probably used Olioboard. I started playing around with it today and came up with my very first Mood board for our guest bedroom. What do you think?

I'm thinking a neutral color on the walls, like a light greige color, and then pops of color with the furniture. I have been very inspired via Pinterest with all the coral and navy pictures popping up lately, so that was my starting point.

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

A few months ago, Jennifer at Dimples and Tangles held a garage sale where I bought a cute little lamp among a few other things.
*Side Note- We won't fully discuss some of the other things I picked up at the garage sale....such as the chairs in this picture that I bought for only $5 each. I got the DIY googley eyes when I saw them and saw SO much potential to paint/recover/etc. Devin thought I was crazy when I brought them home (but what's new).
Currently they're still sitting in our garage in this same state. I haven't given up on them yet. You never want to hear the words 'I told you so' come out of your husbands mouth.

Back to the lamp. I sat it on the table next to our sofa in the living room and the lamp shade was pretty boring.

Devin agreed that we needed a lamp there, and loved the price tag, but his first words were 'It looks like a golf ball.'

So in an effort to get creative and not spend any money, I decided I would paint the shade to give it a little pizazz. I wanted something graphic and fun, so I went with hexagons. Am I the only one noticing hexagons everywhere these days?

I could keep going. I love it. Hexagons are the new chevron and I'm okay with it. In order to get hexagons on my lamp shade without looking completely janky and freehanded, I decided I needed to make some sort of stamp. Insert Potato. The minute Devin walked passed me with some paint, my lamp shade, and a potato sitting on the table, he gave me the 'I'm not even going to ask' look.

If you need to make a quick stamp, potatoes are perfect. They're firm and won't fall apart on you, but easy enough to cut a design through. I cut mine in half and then scored my hex shape into the potato to make sure it looked even and semi- symmetrical. The lines are a bit hard to see in the picture so I threw in some arrows. I may have gotten a bit carried away with the arrows. #sorrynotsorry

My hexagon looked good enough to me so I cut the shape out. I left some of the skin and more of the potato on the bottom so I'd have something to grip.

I used regular acrylic craft paint that I had lying around the house. Before I went straight for the lamp shade, I did a quick run through on a paper towel to make sure all looked good.

I knew it wouldn't give me great coverage but I wasn't really concerned about that...I planned on going back with a paint brush to fill in the shapes later. I mainly wanted to make sure all my hexagons were a consistent shape and size. I was happy with my test stamps so I started stamping away on my shade.

Thirty minutes later, I was really regretting not cutting a larger hexagon out of that potato.

Once I reached the end, I had an awkward area that I had to freehand.

I went back through and filled in all my little hexys.

And here was the result. I loved the way the hexagons turned out!

We lived with the lamp this way for a few weeks and while I loved the shade, I still felt like the lamp base needed to be a little brighter. The dark brown base next to our current dark brown couch looked dreary. I had some whiteish/greyish chalk paint laying around so I decided to give it a spin.

Remember how I told you Devin thought the base looked like a golf ball? Yeah now it looks like a golf ball. I couldn't leave it like that, so I ran into to the garage and grabbed some sand paper before Devin walked by again to give me another Judge Judy look. I figured the sand paper would give the lamp a little more depth by bringing the texture out...and If I go off of my husbands golf game, golf balls + sand are a match made in heaven. He's gonna kill me.

Sunday, August 31, 2014

I haven't posted a project on here in a while but that doesn't mean we have a shortage of projects...It just means I'm a slacker. My bad! A while ago, (like long while) I ventured into my first furniture painting project. I've had this side table sitting in my garage for a while just screaming for some TLC.

Normally this is where I insert my DIY play by play in great detail. I won't be doing that this time. Here's why: I painted this side table almost exactly like I painted our kitchen cabinets. I.e. Deglossing, sanding, priming, painting. It's the no-shortcuts, will-last-you-a-lifetime kind of way. It's a great method and all but now there's a magical thing called chalk paint that takes a fraction of the time. You're probably wondering why I didn't use chalk paint for this table. Good question. I didn't have chalk paint just yet, and I thought I'd use materials I already had handy (read: free).
Here's a quick run down on how I transformed my little table. I'll let the pictures do all the talking.